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Monday, February 18, 2013

Counterpoints: William Lane Craig and Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins- "...although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."[1]William Lane Craig- "“Barrow
and Tipler, two physicists in their book "The Anthropic Cosmological
Principle," list ten steps in the course of human evolution, each of which
is so improbable that before it would occur the sun would have ceased to be a
main sequence star and incinerated the earth. And they calculate the
probability of the evolution of the human genome to be somewhere between four
to the negative 180th power to the 110,000th power and four to the negative
360th power to the 110,000th power. So, if evolution did occur on this planet
it was literally a miracle, and therefore evidence for the existence of God.” [2]Courage and Godspeed,ChadCheckout the rest of the posts in our "Counterpoints" posts here.

4 comments:

Anonymous
said...

This refutation only works if you claim evolution has an eventual goal or desired result (humanity). The chances of the desired result coming about completely by a chance process would indeed be vastly unlikely. However, this definition is to misunderstand evolution, evolution is not goal orientated, and thus to hypothesise a positive end result in such a way is not logically sound. The argument from evolution is that humanity is a by product of a random process, in the same way not a desired goal that has been reached.

This refutation only works if you claim evolution has an eventual goal or desired result (humanity).

I do not think Dr. Craig claims here that the desired result of evolution is humanity. But clearly he does state that if evolution did occur on this planet humanity resulted from it. And it is this result (humanity) that is extremely improbable regardless of whether evolution has an end result or not.

"And it is this result (humanity) that is extremely improbable regardless of whether evolution has an end result or not."

If you shuffle ten packs of cards together and then deal four poker hands from the top, the result will be 'extremely improbable', in that that the chance of that particular set of cards coming up is trillions to one. That doesn't mean a miracle is required to deal a hand.

Also, it is significant that this 'improbable' claim comes from two physicists rather than biologists.

"If it is a process it is not random, there is a goal in mind."

This is false. Waves sort pebbles on a beach in order of size – this is a non-random process with no goal in mind.